The things you drop on your way up the ladder, so you can move faster, you forget you’ll need them when you go back [down]. — Bette Davis in “All About Eve”

Return of the mud

My shift away from using cursive writing for personal correspondence came on gradually. My first entries in my farm journal, 20-plus years ago, were in script, but my handwriting transitioned quite quickly to printing. Perhaps the fact that many of those early entries were lists contributed to that change, but the shift, for me and others, had been coming on for years. A heavy reliance in school and work first on typewriters, then on word processors, and, finally, on the newly emerged personal computer — all accelerated the changeover, one I must admit I did and do welcome.

Many years ago I worked in a regional library that was the repository for collections of manuscripts and papers. The core focus of the collection was on genealogical and historical research. An ability to read cursive was an essential skill for both me and any visiting scholar.

The patterns of writing in script have morphed many times, and one of handwriting’s attractions is that flexibility in style. Cursive allowed room to be creative within a constrained teachable framework. As a research librarian, I became skilled in determining when a document was written (within a couple of decades) based on the writer’s technique in shaping letters. There were even guidebooks to help in deciphering. The shape of the letter Q, for instance, has altered many times over the years. The version I was taught as a child (shaped like the number 2) no one uses today; it fell out of favor in the 1990s, having been replaced by a variation of the printed uppercase letter.

Here at the farm, as we sent out our Christmas cards this week, I found myself printing my meager greetings. In reflection, I wonder if the cultural shift away from sending letters, typed or handwritten, has larger ramifications for our ability to communicate with one other. From a practical standpoint, my own poor handwriting has only degraded further with disuse, leaving me reluctant to handwrite much of anything.

Certainly, not teaching cursive in our schools is creating a people who can’t read cursive. A person’s inability to read family letters, to gain understanding of one’s own history, will certainly diminish a sense of place within a community and culture. In turn, that may leave us vulnerable, as Epictetus said, to giving over our minds to anyone who might want to influence them.

Considering that the handwritten letter, whether in cursive or printing, is now almost as archaic as the horse and buggy, how does our reliance on quicker forms of communication, email or texting or emojis, change how we relate to one other? It has already become rare for me to receive an email from friend or family that is longer than one paragraph, and increasingly, most emails I send receive only a one- or two-word response or none at all. This, of course, is not simply because society gave up writing in cursive. There are many broad changes brought on by our embrace of new technologies that are still being revealed.

Yet, like with so many of such embracings, we have given little thought to their impact. Has the immediacy of digital communications been delivered in a Trojan horse, a community-fracturing trap from which we would struggle to escape? Aside from benefiting cultural literacy and history, taking time to handwrite a letter (or even type) might yet be another tool to overcome our modern alienation. The slower, more thoughtful process of communicating might just have the added benefit of allowing us to think before we “speak.”

I don’t know. I do know that sometimes I wake up and feel as if there is a juggernaut of change bearing down, that we are too willing as a people to jettison the past and all that is associated with it. True, after writing in a miserable scrawl for most of my life, I rejoiced at being able to type my letters on a computer. But if I had to pin down the source of my discomfort, I would say that it is with the immediacy of contemporary communication. I want more, not less, time for reflection. And I want to discover those letters falling out of books.

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Reading this weekend: The Loved One (E. Waugh)